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Life in Thirty Seconds

I loved the recent story on N.P.R. describing how the “Jeopardy!” staff elicit and coach the personal anecdotes that contestants discuss with Alex Trebek before the game begins. There’s something so deliciously quirky and succinct about the stories people choose when they can share just one thing with an audience of millions. But I can also imagine the crazy amount of anxiety this exercise could evoke in contestants. The thirty-second story is the television equivalent of the tattoo or the bumper sticker: a moment in time that hangs on forever. (And though most of us won’t appear on the show, we rely on these stories for venues like cocktail parties and online dating.) I happen to sit near two New Yorker copy editors who are former contestants, so I decided to ask them how it was.

Andrew Boynton, who appeared in 1992, was in a modern-dance company at the time, and guessed that Trebek would ask about that. But instead, Andrew told me, “he asked what kind of music we used for the choreography. I was completely unprepared, and stammered something about using ‘just-starting-out composers’ (huh?) and Beethoven. It was pretty horrible.” He redeemed himself at the show’s end, when Trebek asked him more about dancing itself. Ken Marks must not have been as nervous. He can’t remember the story he shared, though he suspects it was something about his softball team.

Perhaps the best way to figure out just how anxiety-inducing a task is is to attempt it oneself. So I spent time yesterday (way longer than thirty seconds) writing my own thirty-second stories. And since even “Jeopardy!” contestants have two other people sharing the stage, I asked some Book Benchers to do the same. Turns out, we’re a bunch of clowns. Here are our stories, presented in threes, since that’s how many Trebek commissions; please share yours in the comments!

Meredith Blake: 1) I have the same name as the evil stepmother-to-be from the Lindsay Lohan version of “The Parent Trap.” You’d be surprised how many people have seen that movie. 2) I once got kicked out of a Backstreet Boys concert. 3) Andy Richter once sent me a lock of his hair.

Ian Crouch: 1) I was born with six fingers on each hand. 2) I once got shamed by a T.G.I. Fridays employee into helping save a guy from a burning car, after I at first showed reluctance. 3) I got a better job title at a previous job based perhaps entirely on a karaoke performance I did at an office retreat of “I’m a Believer,” in the style of Neil Diamond.

Macy Halford: 1) I accidentally baptized myself in a swimming pool in west Texas. 2) I was a cheerleader from ages nine to sixteen without learning any of the rules of football. 3) My great-great-aunt Icie Macy studied chemistry at Yale with Lafayette Mendel, and wrote a book called “The Composition of Milks.”

Samantha Henig: 1) I once sat on a cactus. 2) I touched Heath Ledger’s arm at a bar in Manhattan, because he was there and because I could. A month later, he died. 3) I am an expert creator of “suicides,” the blend of different fountain sodas that most people stop making when they hit puberty but I still love.

Sally Law: 1) I once entered a contestant named Speedy in a caterpillar race. He was disqualified when he rolled into a ball. 2) My husband wrote the theme song to VH1’s “Pop-Up Video.” 3) I’ve broken my left arm rollerskating. Twice.

Elizabeth Minkel: 1) I’ve spent a decade being called “toots” and “doll” while taking bets at thoroughbred racetracks. 2) My cousin orchestrated the Watergate break-in (and was subsequently imprisoned for it). 3) Waiting for a train in Marseille, France, I kissed a stranger with a black eye and an “undesirable” stamp in his passport after he offered to steal me “anything in the station.” He claimed that he used to rob banks.

Eileen Reynolds: 1) In eighth grade I memorized the fifty most common prepositions in alphabetical order. 2) I’ve twice gone camping in freezing temperatures in Florida. 3) My great-grandfather’s letters are held by the Imperial War Museum in London.

And mine: 1) I moved to New Zealand on September 11, 2001, and moved to New York on September 3, 2010, the day that my New Zealand hometown, Christchurch, suffered a magnitude 7.0 quake. 2) I once threw up in a dirty sock in Vilnius, Lithuania. (I was not drinking.) 3) I did not own a cell phone until 2010.